Anyway it has an Intel Graphics 1000 (GT1) chip in it. Which CPUZ says has an 850MHz core and 874MB of RAM available to it.

I know Intel have stepped up their game in terms of graphics a lot these days but I was wondering if for any kind of gaming he might be better off with even my old DX9 card (a GeForce 7900GS which I believe has 256MB of VRAM and a 4xxMHz processor). The main problem with the card is that he wouldn't get any DX10/11 stuff and no hardware acceleration stuff. I remember when I bought the card DX9 was still widely supported despite the switchover to DX10 being underway (I was running XP anyway). No idea if this is still the case or if many devs are switching off support for DX9 cards.

After doing a bit of research I think he might be better with his integrated but I'm curious as to what you guys think? Tbh I'd forgotten just how old the card was.

H61 = whatever IGP is in the CPU. In your case, I think that's the HD 2000, which is not bad, but below par for current era gaming. It's roughly on the same level as a HD 4200 or GT 520, except Intel has the worst driver support (for graphics) in the world. Intel HD 3000 can play Crysis on minimum, but can't even play Spiral Knights.

Any discreet graphics card will provide better performance, and you can find some very cheap like the GT 450 for around £50.

The more I think about it, the more £320 sounds about right for that system. The only significant difference between the G630 and Core i3 is HyperThreading. G630 is dual core, i3 is dual core + 2 logical cores - same thing with i5 and i7 only with quad cores... or at least that's how I remember it. Add to that all the basic parts of a system, and the labour for a pre-built system, and it's what you'd expect.

And nobody cares about Spiral Knights anymore :3 ... or Crysis for that matter.

Yeah it's not as good as a homemade system for that price, but OEM it's okay. Pair it with a decent graphics card and it'll perform quite well. Also, not very important but that CPU only supports 1066 mhz ram i think.